


Capriccio

by chanyeolk



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Music, Past and Present, Smut, pianist!Baekhyun, somewhat unrequited love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 14:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8017981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chanyeolk/pseuds/chanyeolk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Baekhyun is so, so tired of playing by the score. Chanyeol just wants him to do what makes him happy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Capriccio

Chanyeol has never been very good at understanding other people’s feelings, or even his own, but when he looks down at the man who is pleading with him _please break my fingers_ , even he is able to recognize the pure desperation in Baekhyun’s eyes. His hands are so beautiful and delicate as they rest upon Chanyeol’s larger, calloused and upturned palms, and Chanyeol knows he could never do what Baekhyun asks of him. The hands have been trained and cared for throughout Baekhyun’s life, and Chanyeol will not be the one to destroy that effort. He wraps his own fingers around ones that create the most beautiful music he has ever heard, sighs, and lets them fall back at Baekhyun’s side.

Baekhyun begins to cry with a quivering lower lip and Chanyeol’s exterior cracks. He presses his lips against the top of Baekhyun’s head and whispers, _go on._ The pianist does as he’s told. He adjusts his suit jacket, lets Chanyeol wipe his tears away, and strides towards the stage where he will give yet another performance that makes his heart ache.

Leaving the dressing room, Chanyeol finds a seat in the audience. He excuses himself passed people and sits down towards the center of the second row. The first is reserved for the judges. Baekhyun hasn’t started yet. His fingers linger above the keys, but he has yet to conjure any sounds from them. Anticipation swells in the pit of Chanyeol’s stomach, rises into his throat. He has heard Baekhyun perform this piece a million times in the practice room that he might as well live in.

When the first note is played, Chanyeol’s throat closes up. It’s wrong.

Baekhyun is playing a different piece than what he had practiced. Instead of the bright Liszt piece he had perfected, he begins playing something solemn. Chanyeol had grown so accustomed to the song that sounded soft like bells chiming that the sad chords have goosebumps rising along his arms. Baekhyun’s arms spread wide along the keys, and then the song takes a dramatic turn. It’s so angry and so choppy, like Baekhyun’s fingers are clawing the staccato notes out of the grand piano.

The harsh arpeggios and Baekhyun’s pained expression as he plays make Chanyeol scoot closer towards the edge of his seat. Baekhyun has played the piece before, played it for Chanyeol, and Chanyeol wonders if Baekhyun is talking to him. He wonders if Baekhyun is playing the song with that night in mind, when he had sat Chanyeol down on a kitchen chair and wrapped his arms around him from behind. “ _You spoil me,”_ Baekhyun had purred against the skin of his neck.

Chanyeol has always been so eager to please Baekhyun. He’d do anything to hear the pianist play another song. That night Baekhyun had straddled his lap on the chair, Chanyeol’s hands secured behind him. Two of the fingers that normally elicited noises from the keys were pulling soft whimpers from the back of Chanyeol’s throat as they had explored the inside of his mouth.

Baekhyun plays fast notes in a lower register. They sound a lot like the way Baekhyun had asked that night, _how do I taste?_  

 _Placing a hand over Chanyeol’s mouth, Baekhyun experimentally rolls his hips against the lap of the man under him. He relishes in the way Chanyeol’s eyes go wide and desperate, eyebrows pulling together and raising towards the center. “_ Baekhyun _,” Chanyeol breathes out the second the pianist’s hand is off his swollen mouth. Baekhyun says nothing in response, instead slipping the tie around his neck out of its knot and into the mouth that won’t keep quiet. He rolls his hips again. And again. When Chanyeol groans and lets his head fall backwards against the backrest of the kitchen chair, Baekhyun licks a stripe up the center, tongue flat against Chanyeol’s sticky skin._

The arpeggios keep coming, Baekhyun’s dexterous fingers not slipping for even a beat. Chanyeol is mesmerized. He wonders if everyone else in the audience feels the same emotions coming from Baekhyun’s performance. A plea. A cry. A “ _this is who I am. This is how I feel_.” He can still feel Baekhyun’s soft hands in his and the way they had trembled earlier in the dressing room. To think the pianist before him is the same person as the one who had been falling apart not even five minutes prior.

_Chanyeol’s shirt is still on, but it is unbuttoned and left wide open. His chest is exposed, flushed, and at Baekhyun’s mercy. His pants are unbuttoned and halfway down his thighs. Baekhyun is working his way down Chanyeol’s body with kisses and bites, leaving the other panting and throbbing in his kitchen chair. Baekhyun is still fully clothed which really irritates Chanyeol, but he can do nothing to change it._

_“I’ll play you any song you want after you sing for me,”_ _Baekhyun whispers from his knees in front of the chair. Chanyeol sings. He sings as loud as he can with Baekhyun’s performance tie balled up and shoved in his mouth, and then even louder when Baekhyun removes it. Chanyeol’s song is a beautiful chorus of “Baekhyun” as the inspiration of it stretches his lips and lets Chanyeol closer to the back of his throat._

Baekhyun begins to play louder and angrier. Chanyeol knows this will be Baekhyun’s last show. It’s a beautiful, emotional performance, but that’s not what the judges want. They want what the composer intended to be played by what was written in the score. This is Baekhyun lashing out after an entire lifetime of playing piano. This is Baekhyun telling everyone, _I’m done. I quit. I surrender._

The pianist before him, Zhang Yixing, would probably win this year. He had played the same Liszt piece that Baekhyun practiced, and did it flawlessly yet so uniquely. Baekhyun is great at piano, a prodigy, but not great at making the performances his own. His specialty is playing songs as if a machine is playing back recordings of the composers themselves.

The piece he plays is anything but that. It’s Baekhyun’s own feelings through and through. While it is not a competition-winning performance, it is certainly a performance that no one in the audience will forget. Chanyeol tears his eyes away from Baekhyun on the stage and looks around. The judges in front of him have stopped paying any attention to their scoring sheets. The people around him are captivated. He has never been anything less than captivated by Baekhyun, because that’s what the pianist does. He demands the attention of all that he encounters.

_“Look at me. Don’t look away for even a second,” Baekhyun instructs as he lowers himself onto Chanyeol. Chanyeol has to brace his feet against the floor and clench the muscles of his thighs to keep from bucking his hips up into the warmth that is sinking down around him. Baekhyun’s breath hitches, beautiful and sharp. He is still for a moment, gripping Chanyeol’s shoulder with pale knuckles. He uses the taller male’s shoulders for leverage and bounces on the balls of his feet._

_“What song should I play for you?”_

_“Any song you want,” Chanyeol groans. This isn’t the time to think about that. Not when Baekhyun is riding him so deliciously. His only thoughts are how badly he wants to be able to use his hands, to tug at Baekhyun’s hair and run his thumbs along his cheekbones. He wants to hold his face in his hands and kiss him deeply. He wants to grip Baekhyun’s hips and meet them halfway, faster and harder._

Baekhyun is nearing the end of the song and his tempo is all over the place. His fingers speed up and slow down with no consideration of the time that the score dictates. People’s faces are beginning to show signs of confusion and disappointment and Chanyeol wishes he could tell them all that this is not what Baekhyun normally sounds like, that Baekhyun plays more beautifully than anyone else at this concert, but he’s sure that they all know. Most of them are probably at the show for Baekhyun. For the piano prodigy that has been playing the hardest pieces since he was barely out of diapers.

_“Mozart?”_

_“Beethoven?”_

_“Chopin?”_

_“Tchaikovsky?”_

_“Liszt?”_

_“Debussy?”_

_“What would you like?”_

_Every name that comes out of Baekhyun’s mouth is the wrong one until he is coming with his own hand wrapped around himself and Chanyeol’s name finally the one on his tongue. He wraps his arms around Chanyeol’s neck loosely and rests his head on the taller’s shoulder. After a few moments of Baekhyun trying to collect himself, he frees Chanyeol’s hands. They immediately come up to cradle the pianist’s face, and Chanyeol pulls him closer into a kiss that he never got the entire time that Baekhyun was in control._

_“Why are you so afraid of intimacy?”_

_“Just tell me what you want me to play, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun says, wincing as he stands up and off of the man still seated on the chair. He starts pulling his clothes back on as Chanyeol slides his shirt off all the way._

_“Play whatever you want. Play something you enjoy.”_

_“I don’t enjoy any of it, you should know that by now.”_

_“Then don’t play at all. It’s okay.”_

Baekhyun climbs the keys quickly and sharply and then it’s over. His fingers linger over the keys and from his place in the second row, Chanyeol can tell that he is shaking again. None of the audience seems entirely sure of what they should do. A few people here and there clap. One person stands. Overall, it is awkward.

The pianist is surely disqualified from the competition after how he played, but it doesn’t seem to matter to him. He stands, bows. Chanyeol can see tear tracks on his cheeks.

_Baekhyun sits down at the bench in front of the piano._

_“I thought you weren’t going to play?” Chanyeol inquires._

_Shaking his head, Baekhyun begins to play single, somber notes. “You wanted intimacy, right?”_

_“I suppose.”_

_“This is as close to that as I can get right now,” Baekhyun tells him, takes a sharp breath, and begins descending the scale in the harshest arpeggio he has ever heard. It’s full of sadness and anger as Baekhyun puts every emotion he feels into the three minute piece._

Backstage in the dressing room again, Baekhyun is walking in circles. Chanyeol opens the door and closes the gap between them. He pulls the smaller man into his arms. “How did it feel?”

“It felt good at the time,” Baekhyun replies. “Not so much, now.”

He’s stiff in Chanyeol’s arms, not willing to relax into the embrace.

“You did amazing.”

“I lost.”

“Who cares?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you crying?”

It is at this question that Baekhyun finally lets the tension in his body go. He leans his weight against Chanyeol, raises his arms to grip at the back of Chanyeol’s jacket. Chanyeol can feel him hiccupping into his chest.

“I don’t want to break my fingers,” he cries, looks up at Chanyeol. In turn, Chanyeol shakes his head and smiles softly. “I want to play piano still.”

“So play.”

“But I don’t want to play here anymore.”

Chanyeol understands. He takes both of Baekhyun’s hands in his as he had done before the performance and looks at them closely. Baekhyun’s hands are delicate and soft, they are very much human. They belong to someone who feels a wide range of emotions and feels those emotions very deeply. His life had been dictated by scores just as much as his playing had.

“These competitions are boring anyways,” Chanyeol says in agreement with a shrug and basks in the way Baekhyun smiles shyly and appreciatively up at him.

This time, Baekhyun kisses Chanyeol.


End file.
